Quick, short & to the point: Silverlight 3 has just been released!

Download links: runtime & dev tools.  (note: Scott Hanselman just twittered they're still in the process of uploading this to all sites - you might want to try again in a few hours if something doesn't work).

Next to that, Blend 3 including Sketchflow has also been released, get it from the Microsoft Download Center.

I guess the only thing left is RIA Services, July drop, right? :-)  Hope to see that one appear one of these days as well.

For now: happy coding! :-)

Update!

The July CTP of RIA Services has also been released, and a new version of the Silverlight Toolkit is available @ Codeplex as well. If you use any of these, make sure to download the new versions for use with Silverlight 3, as there are quite a few breaking changes.

So I guess that's all we need, now lets go forth and design great Silverlight applications ;-)

I've noticed a few posts on the Silverlight.NET forums concerning the customization of the X/Y-axis labels of the Silverlight Toolkit's Chart control: trying to get the text to wrap, trying to get the labels to display vertically instead of horizontally, ... 

Well, this is easy to do (working with the December release atm), but finding the right property to set can be quite a challenge. ;-)  So here you go: an Axis has an AxisLabelStyle-property, which you can bind to a style.  In this style, you can set all the properties you want, which will be applied to each and every label on your X- and/or Y-axis.

Eg, this piece of code will make sure the labels on my horizontal Axis (in this case, containing a DateTime) are rotated a bit, have a set width, and I also apply some formatting to the date:

   1: <Style x:Name="HorizontalLabelStyle" TargetType="Charting:AxisLabel">

   2:             <Setter Property="RenderTransform">

   3:                 <Setter.Value>

   4:                     <RotateTransform Angle="300"></RotateTransform>

   5:                 </Setter.Value>

   6:             </Setter>

   7:             <Setter Property="RenderTransformOrigin" Value="0.5,0.5"></Setter>

   8:             <Setter Property="StringFormat" Value="{}{0:dd/MM}"/>

   9:             <Setter Property="Width" Value="65"/>

  10: </Style>

In my chart, I set the AxisLabelStyle to this defined style:

   1: <Charting:Chart x:Name="chtChart">

   2:                    <Charting:Chart.Axes>

   3:                        <Charting:DateTimeAxis AxisLabelStyle="{StaticResource HorizontalLabelStyle}" 

   4:                            Orientation="Horizontal">

   5:                        </Charting:DateTimeAxis>

   6:                    </Charting:Chart.Axes>

   7: </Charting:Chart>

And that's it.  Further customization can off course be done, depending on your specific needs.  Happy charting! ;-)

Well.

I don't know where to begin.

Silverlight 2 has been released, as most of you know already; I've been spending a lot of time with it, trying to incorporate as much of the framework/features as I can in one application - and it's actually coming along just fine; the idea is to show some of the added value a rich application can bring to administrative/business applications, while at the same time showing off as much of the features/possibilities of Silverlight.  Some things I've been playing with/am planning to do: push/pull communication between different instances of the same app through WCF; multi-user app; theming; saving state; ...  next to the obvious: styles&animations.

This, off course, takes up a lot of my free time; especially since I tend to switch designs frequently (I'm not a designer, so there's always something in my designs I'm not completely satisfied with ;-)), but by doing so I continue to learn more and more of this tech with almost endless possibilities.

And then: the weekend happened.

It's like going to sleep in World, v1.0, and waking up in World, v1.5.  The Silverlight Toolkit has been released.  A new version of XAML Power Tools has been released.  Blacklight controls have been released.  Dave Crawford released a beautiful glossy "theme".

By the way, I write "theme" 'cause as far as I experienced, there is no such thing as real dynamic theming in Silverlight.  The Toolkit adds the possibility for implicit theming (simply put: you don't have to give every style a key anymore - it is now possible to make a general themed style for a certain type of control, eg a Button), but dynamic theming (applying a new theme at runtime) isn't possible. I think by combining SL with some AJAX, and effectively reloading your complete SL app, things like this should be possible (or more specific: you can make it feel like it's possible) - but this implicates having to reload your complete application with a different app-file.  We'll see how that works out.

Anyway, all of that in just a few days - at this moment, it feels like 24 hours in a day just isn't enough. :-)